The present invention relates to a bag dispensing system and more particularly to such a system which both facilitates the presentation of advertising text and materials and which effectively guides a user to extract individual bags in the desired manner from a pack of bags retained in the system.
The present invention is, to some extent, an improvement over the constructions disclosed and claimed in co-assigned U.S. Pat. No. 5,332,097 issued Jul. 26, 1994 to Richard M. Wile (the '097 patent). The '097 patent discloses two particular embodiments of a cardboard cartridge for retaining a stack of T-shirt type plastic film bags. In each case, the bags provide an openable mouth with loop handles extending upwardly on either side of the mouth. The handles are linked at their upper ends by a tearaway strip extending between them. In the first of these prior art embodiments, which is also illustrated in FIG. 7 herein, a relatively deep cardboard cartridge 13 is employed which fully encloses the bag handles and the mouths of the bags. A relatively large quantity of cardboard was required to construct the cartridge and the appearance was not entirely acceptable to all customers. The '097 patent also discloses a second embodiment, which is also illustrated in FIG. 8 herein, which utilizes a more abbreviated cartridge 75 to contain the upper ends of the handles and the bridging strips extending between them. A problem with this construction, however, is that customers may attempt to remove bags from the pack by grasping the bags at the openable mouth. Attempting to do this will commonly result in more than one bag being pulled away from the pack, with the additional bags typically being wasted. The present invention is directed towards overcoming the above-described problems and also toward facilitating the presentation of advertising materials in a pleasing and effective manner.